THROUGH THE STUDY OF THE PRINCIPAL
SPACES OF ITALIAN CITIES, THIS SITE EXPLORES
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
AND THEIR METHODS OF REPRESENTATION

Monday, 7 February 2011

"the Paradise, The grave, the city, and the wilderness": travels between the past and future Rome

This phrase from Shelley's Adonais is a route into the concept of Rome as a palimpsest, more evocative in its four overlapping terms than Freud's famous image which compares the city to the human mind 'an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.' Shelley's words suggest the different ways , surely many more than merely four, in which the physical fabric of the city might be read, above all the city which remains a fundamental locus of European culture.

The pattern which can be read in its monuments, as forensic clues in some vast site of investigation, tie events across time to provide the matrix through which urban representation occurs. My paper will explore the city through the narratives which have animated its spaces in fact and fiction, or in the grey zone which includes both those realities. Rome as image of the city is as pervasive as the image of Rome, and therefore the readings of Rome stand proxy for many of the manifestations of the contemporary urban condition.

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About Me

Eamonn Canniffe leads the Architecture Research Centre and the MA in Architecture + Urbanism at the Manchester School of Architecture. He was educated in Architecture at Cambridge and Harvard Universities. In 1996 he held a Rome Scholarship in the Fine Arts at the British School at Rome. Between 1986 and 1998 he taught at the University of Manchester School of Architecture, and between 1998 and 2006 at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. He is the author of Urban Ethic: Design in the Contemporary City (Routledge 2006) (Chinese edition 城市伦理--当代城市设计 2013) and The Politics of the Piazza: the history and meaning of the Italian square (Ashgate 2008). He is co-author (with Tom Jefferies) of Manchester Architecture Guide (1999) and (with Peter Blundell Jones) of Modern Architecture through Case Studies 1945-1990 (Architectural Press 2007), (Chinese edition 现代建筑的演变 1945--1990年 2009) (Spanish edition Modelos de la Arquitectura Moderna -Volumen II 1945-1990 2013). For a number of years he has served as Architecture Series Editor for Ashgate Publishing.